Podcast 47: 5 Common AMCAS Mistakes

Today, Dr. Marinelli discusses some common mistakes that people make on their AMCAS. These mistakes cannot be changed later and are viewed by admission committees as careless or even lazy, so, it is in your best interest to avoid making these mistakes.

[1:50] 1. Identifying information.

This is where you put all the demographical information. There are a couple of areas where you must type in things like your name, birth county, and birth city.

Make sure you are capitalizing the things you need to type in because this is one of the first items an admission committee will see. If they see a lowercase first name or city name, it reflects poorly on you.

[3:45] 2. Biographical information.

This includes additional demographical information about yourself, such as address, language, and childhood home. Make sure you are entering enough information into this section.

For example, Dr. Marinelli sees a lot of people put “decline to answer” for their income level. This is something admissions committee view, it is just to contextualize the application. There is not much of a reason to decline to answer most of these questions, fill out as much as possible.

[5:30] 3. Coursework.

It takes a long time to enter all of your courses accurately. Dr. Marinelli suggests requesting an official transcript from your school and entering exactly how it looks on the transcript.

If you do not enter the information correctly, it may delay the processing time it will take for committees to receive the application.

[7:30] 4. Formatting, grammar, and spelling.

When you copy and paste from word into AMCAS, there can be formatting errors. For instance, spaces may be off, quotes may not transfer over, and idents will be deleted. Be sure to review and fix any issues.

[9:55] Look at the school-specific requirements.

Make sure you are not sending too many letters and are meeting the requirements of how many letters need to be addressed.

Before you hit submit on the main application page, you can create a PDF of your application to print. Make sure you double check your application for the five most common mistakes!